Lee Pryor is Top G no doubt about it but the other lads are very successful at employing too👌
True. But the o/p and Lee's situations are also very different.
Lee was prepared to sacrifice his whole life to focus on his business. From what I remember, he sold his house to invest money in the business and lived with his folks for a while. He was also single and didn't have a family to worry about. He also had the drive to manage and succeed in growing his business. Not many of us have that drive or, dare I say, ability. I haven't.
I very much doubt many would have done what he did; I certainly wouldn't have. My wife did her nut when I purchased an SLX40 back in 2009 when she wanted money to visit Australia. "You didn't need to waste money on a pole you hardly use when I could have put it toward a plane ticket."
When you have a wife and family, everything changes.
When my son joined the business in 2008, we didn't have enough work for the both of us. He purchased an old Peugeot Partner, and I kitted it out with a 500 litre tank. I gave him a full round, which left me with very little, so we canvassed an area where we knew the window cleaner had left. 2 months after son joined the credit crush struck which meant getting new work was more urgent. But we survived. I took us quite a while before I filled my round. It didn't happen 'overnight'. We also lost British Steel on Teesside, but we didn't lose many customers like I envisaged we would.
Times were tight financially. There was enough to buy him an SLX25 as his first pole, but I had to settle for a CLX22 as there wasn't enough money to buy an SLX22 for me.
When you start to employ, your first thought has to be on your employee's welfare. I'm not sure about the op's mindset as he is worried about himself - naturally. His words at the beginning seemed to indicate to me that he would have to come off the tools to run his business. He wrote;
".................... pay someone £25k to do the work while I focus on canvassing and running things off the tools."
